Streaming Media West Preview: Off-the-Shelf Streaming Tools
For The Streaming Toolbox, my new department in Streaming Media magazine, I've been testing all manner of cloud video tools designed to help media companies streamline their workflows. I'm not a rank amateur—in 2016, I taught a newsroom how to run a NewTek TriCaster system—but I wanted to get a sense of how easy it is to use a range of tools and services, many of which offer affordable pay-as-you-go options, to their fullest potential.
That provided fodder for my upcoming workshop at Streaming Media West, "Off-the-Shelf Streaming Tools," where I'll be demonstrating a number of these tools. We'll go from sourcing content to producing an app with a live stream in three hours.
Let’s start off with content, where we've got two options—create or buy. Stringr is a digital marketplace where you can find packaged video, buy stock footage, assign a shoot to a pool of shooters within your area, or look at other companies' stock footage. The company has 100,000 shooters, and in our demo we will request a live stream to be created.
Next up is Vimond.IO. Collaborative online cloud editing allows you to capture a VOD or live asset and do your editing magic, quickly and possibly with help from an editor in a remote location, then deliver it to the various locations you need in each format required.
Make.TV’s Live Video Cloud is a live video switcher, so we will simulate running our own TV station and take in multiple live streams. Once we have live sources, we want to feed them out by mixing multiple cameras or footage, with five-nines guaranteed reliability. There’s a lot going on here, and you'll see me operate my virtual mixer using both a professional and (maybe) even a user-generated content feed.
Next, we'll take a detour and look at how to use an artificial intelligence tool to evaluate a video's content, running both image and sentiment recognition in a few different use cases. I've written about many tools that aren't easy to demo, so I thought this was a good way to bring some machine learning into the mix. I’m also a big user of transcription services that create text from audio files, and I’ll show off one of the tools I use to get transcripts of all audio narration.
After this side trip, we'll look at how Applicaster lets you create your own app. We'll build an app containing elements that members of the workshop audience think are important.
So, we will have gone from capture to delivery, all using new (or new-ish) cloud services. I’m going to have a surprise guest on hand to help identify some of the critical questions you need to ask if you're planning on using these tools, all of which I selected without any vendor input.
This workshop is designed for attendees of all skill levels—you don’t need to be a developer or an engineer. Most of these products will also have representatives at the conference, and they will be able to give more in-depth answers for your specific use case.
For this and much more, join us at Streaming Media West in Los Angeles next week.
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